OpenStack Ascension – Red Hat and Intel both make their moves

It didn’t take long for other OpenStack players to deal their hand, offering up their own IaaS solution. Red Hat make a preview available whilst Intel head to China

After
Rackspace’s recent deployment of a
large-scale OpenStack public cloud, the hugely popular
infrastructure-as-a-service, other members of the foundation have
made their moves.

Just today, open source giant Red Hat laid down their marker by
announcing that their framework based on OpenStack is available in
preview form immediately. Keeping in tune with their recent cloud
manoeuvres, their solution claims to support private, public and
hybrid clouds, meaning that flexibility is at the heart.

Red Hat’s early gambit is hardly a surprise – they have been
playing a key part in the recent OpenStack Essex release and in
general making good noises about the project. In fact, at the
recent OpenStack Summit back in April, Red Hat were revealed to be
the third most active contributor to the project, and consequently
earned Platinum Member status when plans surfaced of OpenStack’s
big move.

Factor in other Red Hat products, especially its extensive
middleware division and you’ve certainly got a compelling
enterprise-grade offer. With this move, it is hoped that Red Hat’s
OpenStack distribution will slot in nicely with other cloud-centric
products such as Enterprise Linux, CloudForms, and its
Platform-as-a-Service, OpenShift.

Red Hat’s CTO and Vice President of Worldwide Engineering Brian
Stevens said he was proud of the early move, stating:

“Through our expanding involvement with OpenStack, we’ve seen a
thriving community develop and are excited in reaching this
milestone along the way to delivering an enterprise-class product
based on this open cloud technology. Our current productization
efforts are focused around hardening an integrated solution of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack to deliver an enterprise-ready
solution that enables enterprises worldwide to realize
infrastructure clouds. We invite OpenStack enthusiasts and
enterprises interested in the technology to download our preview
and provide feedback to help us accelerate the delivery of a stable
OpenStack enterprise platform for the industry.”

Although it is far from the finished article, Red Hat is once again looking
for wider feedback on their distribution, after testing it with
some of the more vocal members of the OpenStack community. Those
who sign up for the distribution can provide feedback to Red Hat’s
OpenStack team and collaborate to iron out any potential
issues.

OpenStack and Red Hat make good bedfellows – both wanting to
keep IaaS clouds open sourced, open to different control models and
open to other tools. A fully supported release is expected in 2013,
but for now the unsupported public preview will have to suffice for
testing out Red Hat’s flavour of OpenStack. You can be certain that
Red Hat’s continued support is bound to keep OpenStack relevant for
some time.

——-

In other OpenStack news, fellow
contributor Intel revealed their partnership with some of China’s
brightest cloud-focused companies to form the China Open
Source Cloud League (COSCL).

The alliance aims to facilitate
development of OpenStack within the growing domestic cloud market.
Intel, alongside Chinese web platform vendor Sina, Linux company
CS2C and Shanghai’s Jiao Tong university will form the
venture.

China is an untapped market for cloud
computing, that many multinational companies have targetted as a
must-have region for deploying their products. Yet with the 150
OpenStack members, China’s cloud computing opportunity has remained
a bit of an enigma.

With its lack of archaic
infrastructure in favour of new cutting-edge technology, it also
proves to be the ideal testing ground for innovation in the sector.
By forming an faction reasonably early, Intel might have jumped
before anyone else in the OpenStack community had chance to think
through strategy.